La Pocatiere

It is such a blessing to travel throughout Canada and discover little corners of the country. This summer I spent some time in La Pocatiere, Quebec, a 5000-person town on the south bank of the St. Lawrence.

It was all good times. Despite its comparatively tiny population, La Poc is actually quite spread out, and one definitely needs a car to get around. Unless of course you're a single person who doesn't have heavy loads and only lives there in the summer, in which case you can probably get away with a bike.

This entry's going to be basically another installement in my "travel blog", so if it smacks of "come, sit through my vacation photos!"...well, that's exactly what it is.

• One thing that confused me for a while when I first got there were the names of the meals. In Quebec, breakfast is dejeuner, lunch is diner, and dinner is souper. I was used to the France model, where breakfast is petit dejeuner, lunch is dejeuner, and dinner is diner.
• I lived in residence with about 150 anglophones of varying French fluency levels. I was quite amused that there was created in that speech community a dialect specific to the French learners. That is, people made mistakes, but they tended to make the same kinds of mistakes, and after a while some of these mistakes even got entrenched as the norm (that's not to say that people weren't good or didn't try - it was just a normal part of the second language acquisition process). One example of this that readily comes to mind is when people would say c'est d'accord, intended with the meaning of This phrase would never be uttered by a Francophone, even if their French did contain a large number of borrowings from English. The reason is that d'accord, in French, is used to mean ok, but only with the meaning of I agree, not with the meaning of I excuse you. And d'accord would never take the subject it (c', from c'est), but only ever I, you, she, we, etc.